Case Study #5  Trip Report

The Customer’s marketing representatives visit Clients in the civil and military aviation industry internationally. The information that they gather on these visits is submitted to the Customer in the form of Trip Reports. A Trip Report document contains what Client was visited, the Customer personnel who attended, which Client Contacts were met or spoken with, the state of the Client's aircraft fleet, and general remarks about the trip as well as specific business insights about the prospects for each Customer division at the Client site.

These specific comments are supported by Strategies, Opportunities and Action Items. The trip reporting process was not standardized, with each division having its own format. Documents were collected in Word format and distributed across the enterprise through a Trip Report mailing list. No statistical analysis was possible and no overarching mechanism was in place to assure that strategies were pursued and action items acted on promptly.

During the build/execution of this project, we provided application design and system architecture, application implementation in concert with existing Customer resources, interfacing with Infrastructure and Data Warehouse personnel to design and troubleshoot supporting systems. During the development process we participated in and supervised debugging and troubleshooting activities as well as the transition to the production environment.

The project (TRS) is a .NET Framework-based solution that utilizes a web application written in C#, a custom web service written in C# and a SQL Server 2000 datastore. TRS provides a simple web-based front-end for creating, editing and distributing Trip Reports. It also provides easy management of Trip Report related action items, giving high visibility to due and overdue Action Items. Using Exchange Server, TRS notifies assigners and assignees when Action Items are created. It also notifies assigners when Action Items are resolved. From an architectural perspective, TRS leverages Active Directory through a custom COM+ package for security information with access being controlled through 4 custom Windows 2000 Security Groups.

Along with managing trip reports, TRS also exposes a rich set of search and reporting features. Users can search for business contacts, Clients and Trip Reports using several key parameters, such as sales region, name, visit date, etc. Reports are available that document opportunities, Action Items, and competitor information. These reports present the Customer's marketing personnel with unprecedented issue visibility.